“When the first responders arrived at Pulse, they called out: ‘If you’re alive, raise your hand.’ ”

Such was the scene described by Rabbi Rachel Bat-Or of JQ International, when she took to a podium at Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) in West L.A. during a candlelight vigil June 13, one night after a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., was the scene of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

It was a brutal rampage that lasted hours and continued until early morning. At the crack of dawn, the street was littered with broken glass, ambulances and stretchers.

As the director of a helpline run by the nonprofit that serves the Jewish LGBTQ community, a national tragedy like this immediately propelled Bat-Or to action. 

“I went into high-work mode,” she told the Journal. “I was so focused on doing something.”

At BCC, Bat-Or spoke with candor, urging the audience to be more proactive within their communities: to write letters — not only to politicians, but to friends and family; to volunteer; to help organize inclusion trainings.

On average, JQ International’s Helpline receives eight to 10 calls a week — each of which is forwarded to Bat-Or’s cellphone, where she’s on call six days a week — but just days after Orlando, the number of calls tripled, she said. 

“Most wanted to talk about their fears and have someone listen and understand,” Bat-Or said.

One ominous issue about the Orlando shooting is that it took place in a nightclub, she told the Journal.

“The fact that it happened at a bar made it that much worse,” Bat-Or later said. “We have come to see bars as safe zones for us, and they clearly aren’t.” 

JQ International’s own offices are located above a bar, and the organization’s security concerns currently are being addressed by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ Community Safety Initiative.

In the wake of recent events, Bat-Or said the Helpline is focusing on how to better serve the community. “Two things that are very important to us right now are gathering resources for callers and, just in general, getting the word out,” she explained over the phone. 

“Getting the word out” for Bat-Or means focusing attention on LGBTQ inclusion training sessions for places of education, business and worship. Soon, she’ll host a workshop about LGBTQ awareness at the Southern California Board of Rabbis’ annual pre-High Holy Day conference. She hopes that this workshop will inspire rabbis to discuss LGBTQ issues in their sermons when they take to the bimah this upcoming holiday season. 

The idea for the Helpline was conceived in 2012, when JQ’s founder Asher Gellis and JQ board member Janelle Eagle realized there was a need within the community for people searching for resource referrals and LGBTQ information. It was officially launched two years later thanks to seed funding from Federation’s Caring for Jews in Need Initiative and a $250,000 Cutting Edge Grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.

JQ’s Helpline is still in the early stages of development. Since March of last year, about eight volunteers have been attending training sessions each week during which they do role-playing, resource research, and team-building exercises. The backgrounds of these volunteers are diverse — they hail from Orthodox to Reform upbringings, LGBTQ and ally, ages 28 to 67. And yet they are unified by a singular purpose.

Although JQ Helpline is a Jewish-funded program, its scope goes beyond religious affiliation. The type of call JQ typically gets ranges from parents looking for gender-fluid Jewish day schools to individuals searching for LGBTQ-friendly recovery centers. 

One recent caller, a 46-year-old lesbian mother of three originally from Tehran, Iran, now living in Orange County, called the Helpline to receive legal counsel after her ex-husband threatened her custody of their children. 

“We are Muslim,” she said about herself and her newfound life partner, also a Muslim woman. “JQ is there to help everybody. We are proud to be part of the JQ community.”

As JQ Helpline continues to expand, Bat-Or mentioned it continues to search for extra funding, expanding staff and volunteers. After all, it’s the only resource and social service referral line specifically designed to serve LGBTQ Jews, their families and allies in the United States. By summer 2017, the Helpline hopes to have 20 trained volunteers answering calls in shifts.

The Helpline is accessible by email at helpline@jqinternational.org and by phone at (855) JQI-HLPS. 

Jewish mysticism holds that every year at around midnight on Shavuot, the skies open up, as they did in the Torah story over Mount Sinai, for prayers to ascend to God.

Not long after the skies were supposed to have opened this year, 49 people were murdered by a terrorist in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and 50 more were wounded — the deadliest mass shooting in American history. 

On the opposite side of the country in Los Angeles, news of the massacre instantly transformed what would have been a festive, double-holiday weekend — Shavuot and pride week — into a community-wide exercise in grief, courage and solidarity.

Rabbi Denise Eger of Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood learned about the massacre in a text from the shul’s rabbinic student as she was preparing for the Sunday morning holiday service. The devastating news came after a long night at a Shavuot teach-in with seven other Reform synagogues at Stephen Wise Temple.

The news quickly put a damper on a weekend that began at Kol Ami with a Friday evening gay pride service.

“We prayed for the welfare of lesbian, gay and transgender people; we prayed for our straight allies and friends,” Eger said in a phone call with the Journal. “And then you wake up the day after Shabbos in the midst of supposedly a holiday where we’re wishing each other ‘chag sameach’ [happy holiday].”

She added, “I said to my congregation this morning, ‘I don’t really feel like I can do the joy part this morning.’ I can’t wish them a happy holiday.”

By the time the pride parade was starting in West Hollywood on June 12, the news was beginning to percolate through concerned calls, texts and social media posts.

Neil Spears, a board member at JQ International, a Jewish LGBTQ support and educational organization, read about the massacre before he even got out of bed. But the news suddenly became personal when he got a call on his way to the parade from a friend who had been at the nightclub that evening.

The friend was calling to tell Spears about a man who’d been heading to the L.A. pride parade when he was arrested in Santa Monica with weapons and supplies for explosives. 

He also mentioned that a friend of his had been killed in Orlando, and another was unaccounted for.

“I just had to sit down on the sidewalk,” Spears said. “I just had to stop and pause, because it hits really close to home.”

When he arrived at the JQ International office, which is on the parade route, he found that security had been stepped up because of the Santa Monica incident. He was supposed to lead a meeting of the Jewish Queer Straight Alliance (JQSA), a group for teens, but entry to the office was restricted to minors. So they met on the sidewalk with the parade in full swing.

At one point, Ron Galperin, L.A.’s city controller and the first openly gay person elected to citywide office, came by on a float while Spears was meeting with the teens.

“I said to them, ‘That guy up there is gay and Jewish,’ and then they cheered,” he said. “They were happy to know that.”

In advance of the parade, Galperin released a statement saying, “The parade is a chance for the LGBT community to come together in the name of love — love for one another and for ourselves. Today we extend that love to our brothers and sisters in Orlando and march in solidarity with them.”

Tami Miller, JQ International’s development director, who marched in the parade with people from her organization and other Jewish groups, said that the number of marchers was lower than in years past because of the holiday.

She said she hadn’t heard about the massacre until after she arrived at the pride parade — by which time, fortunately, she had a group of friendly faces to help her cope.

“Today was our vigil,” she said. “And the way we did our vigil is to be proud and be strong.”

Miller added that the organization will be looking to expand its program, offering inclusion training for Jewish organizations on how to interact with LGBT issues and vice versa.

At the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica boulevards, Beth Chayim Chadashim Cantor Juval Porat and Rabbi Heather Miller stood alongside a banner reading “World Congress of GLBT Jews.”

Speaking from the parade by phone with the Journal later that day, Porat said events such as the shooting in Orlando should galvanize the community around LGBT issues.

“Today, LGBT people and their allies should march prouder and louder and more colorful, and just shout out the values upon which I believe society can be healthy — and that is love and acceptance and inclusion and, most of all, less focused on fear and less focused on bashing others and judging others. … It might sound banal and trite, but this is what it’s about. It’s not easy; we’re trying to model that,” he said.

Idit Klein, executive director of Keshet, a national organization that works toward LGBT inclusion in the Jewish community, said in a statement that she had been contacted with messages of solidarity from Christian and Muslim leaders. 

“When the shooter opened fire, many Jews were observing the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates when the Jewish people stood together at Mt. Sinai,” the statement read.

It continued, “So, too, we stand together in solidarity with the people of Orlando and with LGBTQ people and allies everywhere.”

Rabbi Zach Shapiro, who leads Temple Akiba in Culver City and is married to Galperin, offered his thoughts in an email to the Journal.

“Ecclesiastes teaches, ‘There is a time to be silent and a time to speak,’ ” he wrote. “While a moment of silence may feel appropriate in memory of the precious souls that were murdered — silence won’t make the very real issues we face disappear.” 

He added, “It is a time to speak to each other. We can only face these issues when we engage in earnest, and often difficult, conversations.”

After four years of attending the Creating Change Conference, I was shocked and dismayed by the anti-Semitism I experienced at the 2016 conference last month in Chicago. Let me give you some background and then I will tell you what happened to me.

I was expecting to reconnect with my colleagues and friends from all over the world. Imagine thousands of LGBTQ and ally activists gathering each year to celebrate, learn from one another and grow as an international community. Creating Change is the LGBTQ National Task Force’s pride and joy. It’s an environment that is supposed to excite participants, fuel their drive to be activists and celebrate all the facets of our vibrant LGBTQ communities. With so much social justice work to be accomplished, it is usually an awe-inspiring experience to see individuals riled up to make a difference in the world.

At each conference, there is a Jewish Working Group that hosts a range of workshops and programs meant to strengthen the intersection of LGBTQ and Jewish identities. Two of those events planned for this year were a community-wide Friday night Shabbat service, followed by a reception at a different location, with speakers from the Jerusalem Open House (JOH) and hosted by A Wider Bridge, the pro-Israel organization created to connect Israelis, LGBTQ North Americans and their supporters. After months of recovering from the deadly extremist attack during last summer’s pride march in Jerusalem, the JOH has been busy caring for its community. This was an opportunity to lift up the leaders of JOH. As the organizers from A Wider Bridge said, it was a chance to embrace JOH as part of a global community with common goals across borders regardless of religion, nationality or citizenship.

Our Shabbat service was a beautiful event and concluded with Salaam, a Hebrew and Arabic song with lyrics that speak of peace for all people. The second that our service was over, we heard the raised voices of hundreds of protesters waiting for us in the hallway just outside the service. They were calling for the destruction of Israel. They were yelling that we are the “oppressors of people of color.” They yelled that we were “responsible for Black people being killed and sterilized.” We weren’t at the reception for JOH yet, but for those of us who went, the crowd of protesters were there attempting to block us the entire way.

At the reception, they blocked the door, letting only some of us through. Within minutes, they stormed into the reception and took over the stage. The representatives from the JOH had to be escorted out to safety. Protesters continued to run around and scream in our faces. After 30 minutes of this relentless screaming, the event was shut down.

I was reminded of the stories I’ve heard and read about the European ghettos being stormed by torch-wielding anti-Semites, blaming our ancestors for countless horrors. Fortunately, none of us were physically injured, but many of us were yelled at for the rest of the weekend and called “Zionist racist oppressors.”

My own personal views were irrelevant to these protesters. I am what most people would consider to be on the left of the discussion about Israel and how it should it make peace with the Palestinians. But because they saw me as an Ashkenazi Jew, they cast me into a group to be demonized and attacked. They gave up an important opportunity to find a connection with me and instead labeled me a racist because of what I looked like and because I am a Jew.

The organizers of the Creating Change Conference have expressed apologies and made statements about the events that transpired, being careful not to blame one group over another. However, their statements make it clear that the organizers need to revisit their own policies so something like this doesn’t happen again.

Those of us in the Jewish Working Group spent several days supporting one another and standing strong against those who were bullying us. Our goal is to always share as many viewpoints and opinions as possible in order to have an honest and transparent dialogue. Where we go from here is still to be determined, but as one of the leaders of JQ International and the Jewish Working Group of Creating Change, I promise we will continue to work to eliminate the type of incorrect assumptions about LGBTQ Jews that were displayed at the conference. We will continue to demand safe spaces for all community members regardless of their skin color, religion or nationality.

I don’t have a quick fix for the problem at hand, but for those of us who have spent our lives working on social justice causes, we know that, unfortunately, the solutions are never swiftly realized.

Asher Gellis is executive director of JQ International, jqinternational.org.

It was 9 p.m. on a Thursday and Asher Gellis, founder of the out-and-proud nonprofit JQ International, was sitting on a barstool at Revolver, a West Hollywood hot spot, as scantily clad performers shimmied on tabletops. 

Earlier that evening, his blooming organization had hosted a housewarming party upstairs — complete with a mezuzah hanging — at its new headquarters. Referred to as “JQlub,” the new digs are a big transition for JQ, which up until the previous week was run out of Gellis’ Echo Park apartment.

Nearly 100 people attended JQlub’s unveiling, the air charged with excitement as board members and community allies scouted the cozy 800 square feet of new territory. With brand-new floors, teal walls and big, bright windows that overlook the traffic and neon signage of Santa Monica Boulevard, JQlub’s new space feels more like a Greenwich Village studio loft than a nonprofit’s meeting space. Then again, JQ isn’t your typical nonprofit.

It goes back to when Gellis, now 39, was 26 and undergoing major life transitions. He had just left his job within the Jewish community, broken up with his Jewish boyfriend and was left thinking, “Where do I go now?” Searching for his place within Judaism, he founded a community of his own with JQ. 

“It started as a community and then turned into a nonprofit,” Gellis said.

Currently, JQ is an integral resource for the Jewish LGBTQ community, spearheading programs for teens (The Valley Jewish Queer Straight Alliance) as well as organizations, schools and workplaces (Inclusion Consulting). It also offers a social service referral call center for LGBTQ individuals and their families (The Warmline). JQ even paired with Birthright to help host two LGBTQ-friendly trips within the last three years, with more trips slated.

That’s all to say JQ has been busy, but it couldn’t have done it alone.

“It’s amazing to be a gay Jew now, when the Jewish community has made the LGBTQ cause their No. 1 cause,” Gellis said enthusiastically. With hands-on support from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, he said, “We’re not just getting funding, we’re getting partnership.”

Scott Minkow, vice president of partnerships and innovation for Federation, spoke at the JQlub housewarming, giving credit to Federation president Jay Sanderson and others. He said he’s proud of the work Federation and JQ are accomplishing together.

“This is not the Federation of your parents,” he said. “This is not even the Federation of five, 10 years ago.”

JQ board member Neil Spears gushed about the need for JQ and its new space. Before the ceremony, he told the Journal, “It’s important that we have a space, but what’s more important is what’s going to happen here.” 

Todd Shotz, founder of Hebrew Helpers and chair of JQ’s board of directors, told the Journal that JQ finally gave him a place to embrace both of his identities: “I’m Jewish and I’m gay,” he said. 

Shotz was one of many volunteers who labored for a month renovating JQlub. “I painted those floorboards,” he said, pointing to his craftsmanship. And after all that sweat and toil, “I’m glad we finally have our own space,” Shotz said.

“It’s a miracle in the LGBT world,” mused Rabbi Rachel Bat-Or about JQ’s existence. She officiated the ceremony at JQlub for hanging a mezuzah — a ceramic tallit inscribed with the Hebrew letter shin. 

“Everyone who walks through this space is protected by the doorposts of Israel,” Bat-Or told the Journal after everyone had left the space and gone downstairs for an after-party at Revolver. Bat-Or, also a family therapist, runs The Warmline and said it received 450 calls last year, and more are expected this year.

Meanwhile downstairs, JQ board members and allies mingled at the nightclub. Gellis was the man of the night, as people lined up to speak with him. When Gellis was a teen, he said, he remembers haunting similar establishments; not prepared to “come out,” he’d occasionally muster up the confidence to frequent these spots solo. 

“It was horrifying and terrifying. I’d walk in, walk around the tables and walk out,” he reminisced about his gay club rendezvous while sipping a cocktail. But now, 20 years later, his offices and headquarters are located just above this thriving nightclub. 

It’s a big step for JQ’s founder, who instead of attending this club solo, was accompanied by his French boyfriend, Arthur Guillosson, sitting proudly by his side. 

“He’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met,” said Guillosson about Gellis. “He reconnected me with my Judaism.”

Although attitudes are becoming increasingly accepting toward homosexuality in the Jewish community, prejudices remain in the typically more conservative Persian community. To help bridge the gap, JQ International — a nonprofit, Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to supporting LGBT Jews — held a celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

The March 19 event, held at Spice Affair Indian restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills, drew more than 100 people, including Jews and Muslims, for dancing, drinking and shmoozing from 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Attendees enjoyed Persian snack food, Indian entrees and cocktails and filled the dance floor as a DJ played upbeat Persian sounds. 

As the evening went on, the energy of the room went up a notch. Couples and groups boogied on the floor, showing off traditional Persian moves — arms extended outward and rotating in circular motions, knees bent — and even the older members of the mostly male crowd were showing signs of life. 

Among those celebrating Nowruz, whose official observance was March 21, was a 74-year-old man named Jansheed, who declined to provide his last name and who came from Newport Beach for the event.

“I was always out — I was never in,” he told the Journal when asked when he came out of the closet.

Born Muslim, the man described himself as nonreligious. He attributed the growing acceptance of LGBT people to education and “television, radio and newspapers that say, ‘It’s all right to be gay.’ ”  

Asher Gellis, executive director of JQ International, said this was the first time the organization coordinated an event specifically for the LGBT Persian community. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and ROI Community helped put on the event. 

JQ International board of directors member Shervin Khorramian, who spent his 20s living in Asia and Europe, according to the JQ International website, said there was a specific goal to the gathering. 

“This event is really a chance for us to get the Persian community together, specifically, the gay Persian community,” he said. “It’s an effort to get people together and create a Persian community for the gay Persians of this city.”

Many of the attendees at the event were still in the closet, Gellis said. 

Attendee David Kianmahd indicated that this type of party could be just the beginning, as more gay Persian Jews come out of the closet and parents of LGBT Persian Jews have to change their attitudes if they are still hanging on to biases against homosexuality.

“I feel like there is this new, young generation starting to come out,” he said. “It’s kind of forcing parents to deal with it.”

Meanwhile, Khorramian, 44, who said he came out to his friends and family approximately 20 years ago, has been dedicating his life to promoting inclusion for LGBT Persian Jews ever since. He drew a parallel between his personal journey and that of the larger community. 

“It’s been a real step-by-step process, learning to accept, having them [my family] accept back — it’s been a give-and-take, and now I can say after 22 years, we’ve really crossed the Rubicon. This is it, we’ve crossed the point where we are in a position of being accepted. Fifty years from now, we are going to look back, and we will no longer have to say whether we are out or not, we just are,” he said. “We’re taking that final journey.” 

“Dead Sea Scrolls: The Exhibition” represents not only “the birth of modern Judaism but also of Christianity … and later, Islam. … So we’re really celebrating the Abrahamic traditions and monotheistic religions,” explained David Siegel, the consul general of Israel in Los Angeles, during a press conference last week.

Siegel was introduced by Jeffrey Rudolph, president of the California Science Center, which is hosting the highly anticipated show. Siegel spoke of partnering with the center and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) to bring to Los Angeles the scrolls, mostly religious texts that date from 250 B.C.E. to 68 C.E., as well as more than 600 artifacts from the Israelite period.

In an interview after the press conference, Siegel called it “the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century and the largest-ever exhibition coming out of Israel.

 “The exhibition is also significant in the way that it is not political,” he added.  “It’s not about news headlines, but the significance of Israel to world religions and to all peoples, all nations.”

But whenever Israel is involved, it seems, politics are likely to simmer, at least beneath the surface.  At the press conference, Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the IAA, alluded to the Palestinian Authority’s claim to ownership of the scrolls.  “[But] the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by Jews and are part of the spiritual assets of the Jewish nation,” Dahari said.  “It is our right to possess the scrolls — it’s not a legal but a moral issue.”

In an interview, Dahari explained that the first seven scrolls discovered by Bedouins in a cave near Qumran in 1947 were eventually purchased by Israeli archaeologists and are now housed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.  When the northern part of the Judean desert came under Jordanian rule in 1953, it was the Jordanians and others who discovered 900 more scrolls in caves at Qumran. The area of Qumran has been in Israeli hands since the Six-Day War in 1967.

“The scrolls were not excavated by Palestinians … so they have no demands upon Israel,” Dahari said. “But the Palestinians say, “No, the excavations took place in the West Bank, and the West Bank is our property. However, according to international laws, they’re not, because Palestine is not [yet] a state. And even if it becomes a state in the future, this has nothing to do with the past.”

 Still, he admitted, “I am afraid for the future of the scrolls.”

— Naomi Pfefferman, Arts & Entertainment Editor

With a record 1,100 people in attendance, the Israeli-American Council (IAC) held its seventh annual gala March 8 at the Beverly Hilton and announced the purchase of a $10 million property in Winnetka that will be used as a community center. IAC plans to announce the exact location of the site at a future time.

The gala brought in $23.4 million for the IAC, with casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, pledging $12 million. Haim Saban, who was seated next to the Adelsons, pledged $1.2 million.

“Sheldon is 10 times richer than me,” Saban quipped to the crowd. “I said to Sheldon, ‘Listen, whatever you give, I’ll give one-tenth.’ ”

The IAC gave real-estate businessman and philanthropist Stanley Black a lifetime achievement award for his decades of support for Israel, and the evening’s honorees were Roz and Jerry Rothstein, founders of StandWithUs, a pro-Israel education and advocacy group. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, delivered a pre-recorded video message that thanked the IAC and acknowledged its role in strengthening the State of Israel from the United States.

Comedian Modi Rosenfeld was the evening’s master of ceremonies. At one point, he asked the crowd, “How many of you don’t speak Hebrew?” When a good portion of the audience raised their voices, he responded, “This is going to be the longest night of your lives.”

— Jared Sichel, Staff Writer

JQ International honored several successful LGBTQ role models from the arts community as well as a gay religious leader during its annual awards brunch March 8 at the historic Wilson Harding Golf Course Clubhouse at Griffith Park. 

From left: Rabbi Barbara Zacky, Bruce Vilanch, JQ International Executive Director Asher Gellis, Faith Soloway and Andrea Meyerson. Photo courtesy of JQ International

Those being feted were folk musician and writer Faith Soloway (JQ Inspiration Award), who also is a writer for “Transparent,” the show created by her sister Jill Soloway; comedy writer and performer Bruce Vilanch (JQ Trailblazer Award); filmmaker Andrea Meyerson (JQ Visibility Award) and Rabbi Barbara Zacky (JQ Community Leadership Award).

“After I came out, I identified strongly as a Jewish lesbian, but there weren’t many places that honored all of me,” Zacky said in a statement. “JQ has created an open and inclusive community of LGBT Jews and I’m so glad to be a part of that.”

Approximately 165 people turned out for the event.

JQ International describes itself as an inclusive community for LGBTQ Jews that raises awareness and acceptance of LGBTQ community members in the Jewish world.  

“We create programs and services that foster a healthy fusion of LGBTQ and Jewish identity, which offer LGBTQ Jews, their friends, families, and loved ones the opportunity to connect with each other while fostering a strong sense of self,” the organization’s website indicates.

“Voices of Dissent: A Refugee’s Story,” a recent panel discussion at Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, included topics ranging from Iranian Jews and other minorities in Iran, to Coptic Christians’ struggles in Egypt under Muslim rule, to Yazidis in Iraq who are suffering under ISIS.

From left: Raymond Ibrahim, Gina Nahai, Elias Kasem and Karmel Melamed. Photo by Natalie Farahan

The Feb. 26 event featured Jewish Journal contributor and attorney Karmel Melamed, author Raymond Ibrahim and activist Elias Kasem.

“The Iranian regime is a human rights disaster, and we’re not talking about it in the United States,” Melamed said. “No one is covering it, and it is shameful. The nuclear [issue] is getting a lot of coverage, I don’t get into that, but the plight of Christians, of Baha’is, artists, even just regular Muslims who don’t agree with the regime — they are facing horrible human rights situations.” 

Author and Journal columnist Gina Nahai moderated the event, which drew approximately 30 attendees and was sponsored by Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA).

Among those in attendance were Natalie Farahan, JIMENA’s Los Angeles program director; Kelsi Copeland, communications and program manager at Kol Ami; Sadie Rose-Stern, the congregation’s executive director; and Siamak Kordestani, assistant director at American Jewish Committee, Los Angeles.

Moving and Shaking highlights events, honors and simchas. Got a tip? Email ryant@jewishjournal.com.

In 2009, nine years into Shelby Ilan-Pacheco’s marriage to her husband, she came to know with certainty something she had felt for so long. She was gay. But knowing this and doing something about it, doing anything, really, were two different things. 

“I was paralyzed,” recalled the Valley Village resident, whose two children were very young at the time. “I didn’t know what to do with my life. I had a support system, but I didn’t have a huge circle of friends in the gay community.” She considered going to the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. But, she said, “I was afraid to go by myself. I also wanted that Jewish community.” 

She reached out to the Los Angeles-based JQ International, which serves the Jewish LGBT community. They helped her find a Jewish mental health professional. And Ilan-Pacheco started attending JQ’s Shabbat dinners and special events regularly. 

“It gave me a sense of calm, peace and community,” she said.

Last month, inspired by stories like Ilan-Pacheco’s, and hundreds of calls over the years from LGBT Jews and their family members seeking support, JQ International launched a warmline (855-574-4577), which is more or less a hotline, but with limited hours — in this case, about 10 hours a week (although JQ hopes to expand those hours in the future). Theirs is a free service available to anyone who self-identifies as LGBT and Jewish, as well as their family members and loved ones. Callers can remain anonymous and are also welcome to email (warmline@jqinternational.org). 

The birth of the warmline, and in particular, the involvement of Rabbi Rachel Bat-Or, who is also a marriage and family therapist, began serendipitously. On the day last year that Bat-Or was scheduled to talk with JQ executive director Asher Gellis and board member Janelle Eagle about how she might get involved with the organization, Gellis received a phone call en route to the meeting. 

“It was someone out of state who was concerned about her son,” recalled Bat-Or. “She had put ‘Jewish’ and ‘gay’ into the computer and came up with our phone number. I ended up talking to her and had the experience of how needed the warmline was.”

Shortly thereafter, representing JQ and the dream of a warmline, Bat-Or applied to The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ social entrepreneurship program, PresenTenseLA, and was selected as one of 11 fellows. The eight-month part-time program, which paired her with both a coach and a mentor, culminated on May 21. And that evening, at PresenTenseLA’s Launch Night, a splashy event held at the Pacific Design Center, the warmline officially became a reality. A $30,000 grant from Federation to JQ helped to set up the infrastructure and cover Bat-Or’s part-time salary.

The calls and emails thus far have run the gamut. “We get quite a few calls from people wanting therapists,” Bat-Or said. “We’ve also gotten calls from people who have LGBT people in their house, and they need more information on how to be welcoming.” Several calls have been from parents of LGBT Jewish teens “who are coming out or are already out and need support.” Every call, said Bat-Or, is “on a scale of important to completely urgent. One urgent one we had was from a young man who emailed me that he was getting out of a relationship with domestic violence and needed a place to stay that night.”

While Bat-Or does not provide counseling services per se in this role, she networks with a number of other organizations and professionals — many, but not all, Jewish. In the case of the immediate needs of the young man, for instance, Bat-Or called every shelter she could find. “I was able to gather a lot of resources, which I gave him,” she said. 

Some might question the need for such a niche service. There are a number of Jewish warmlines and hotlines, and several already serve the LGBT community. But, according to Gellis, there are reasons people might be reluctant to go these routes.

“The Jewish community has certainly embraced the LGBT cause as one of their major social justice issues,” Gellis said. “But it’s very new. It has not really permeated through the entire community. It’s more on an activist level. So you have individuals like myself raised in L.A. at a Conservative synagogue. I had no gay Jewish role models growing up. I thought I was going to have to make a choice between being gay or Jewish. I would not think I could turn to Jewish Family Service (JFS).” In fact, Gellis said, JFS is very LGBT-friendly, and the two organizations regularly collaborate.

“The same thing goes in reverse,” Gellis added. “It’s very hard for somebody coming from the Jewish community who is not out, who lives in L.A., to walk into the Gay & Lesbian Center in Hollywood. The chances of running into someone they know are ridiculously low. But if you’re a Persian Jew or an Orthodox Jew, that’s a terrifying thing.”

Starting in the fall, Gellis hopes to offer training sessions to people interested in manning the warmline. The goal will be to have a cadre of 20 trained volunteers committed to at least six months of service. “We’d like to have this open 30 hours a week,” he said. For now, though, it’s just Bat-Or, and she loves the work.

“It’s so gratifying,” she said. “This is my rabbinate, a project of my heart and soul. My history is, I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. I tried to come out twice, but couldn’t because of the time, and where my family was, and where my head was, and what nice Jewish girls are supposed to be. Had there been a JQ warmline, if I had ever heard the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘Jewish’ in a sentence that was positive, it would have made a world of difference. For me, every phone call is for the person calling, but also for me personally.”

As for Ilan-Pacheco, she has a good relationship with her now ex-husband. Her kids are doing great. And she just got back from her honeymoon, with her new wife.

Asher Gellis talks about his life with a modest but clear-eyed sense of wonder that fits his role as a young community activist who is just beginning to hit his stride. Next week, JQ International, an organization that has helped to nurture his development as a leader, will host a seder that will include readings from a new haggadah weaving the history of gay and lesbian people into the story of the Exodus.

Like the Jews emerging from their captivity in Egypt, Gellis said his own experience of oppression lent a special urgency to his quest to establish a community for people wandering in a spiritual desert. A decade ago, he was just out of college — and just out of the closet — and feeling very much alone in the wilderness.

“There was no place to be Jewish and gay in Los Angeles,” he said. “Some temples had gay programming, but they seemed more oriented toward people who were partnered, had kids.”

As a young man just discovering himself, Gellis said, he simply didn’t connect with communities oriented around family identity — conventional or otherwise.

Then he discovered a scattered group of like-minded young gays and lesbians who were beginning to coalesce into a community. They had a variety of backgrounds — from secular Jews who had been involved in JCCs to Orthodox Jews who had been through yeshiva.

“JQ International evolved organically,” said Gellis, who is now executive director of the Los Angeles-based organization, which focuses primarily on people in their 20s and 30s. “It’s a true grass-roots organization. Once we had a critical mass of people, things just took off.”

With deep roots in the Jewish communal experience, JQ International has grown to more than 600 members from the dozen or so who gathered for the organization’s first meeting in 2002. Most are in Los Angeles, but new chapters have just opened in New York and Arizona. JQ’s programs are at once social and socially aware — a game night doubles as a food drive, a picnic is also an occasion for planting trees in a local park.

And observances of Jewish holidays become opportunities for young LGBT Jews to mend the rift they often feel between their religious and sexual identities.

“It’s essential to the process of coming out to learn how to lead a less-compartmentalized existence,” Gellis said.

Integrating elements of Jewish identity into their experience as gay men or lesbians also encourages JQ’s relatively youthful members to develop a sense of pride in the legacy of LGBT activism.

“Often there’s no sense of transmitting history in the gay and lesbian community,” Gellis said. “A lot of younger gays and lesbians don’t know what Stonewall [the New York riots that prompted the LGBT liberation movement] was about, or they don’t know how they came to have the rights they have. That’s what being Jewish is about — having a good strong knowledge of who I am and where I come from.”

The upcoming Passover seder, which will be hosted by Hillel at USC on April 26, exemplifies the organization’s focus on integrating Jewish and LGBT identities through activism and traditional observance. A distinctive feature of the event is the alternative Seder plate — which holds a coconut.

“The coconut represents young closeted gay people,” Gellis explains. “Even though they’re sweet and tender-hearted on the inside, they’re also stuck inside a hard shell. It’s our way of remembering people who can’t be with us because they’re not out [of the closet] yet.”

But the element of the seder that’s generating the greatest excitement in JQ’s community is a new haggadah that documents the tradition that’s emerging as JQ evolves from an organization into a movement.

“Stories in gay and lesbian experience find a lot of parallels in the Passover story,” said Kevin Shapiro, a member of JQ’s board of directors and a graduate student in the MBA program at USC. “The main theme of Passover is exodus. The Jews went from being enslaved and not living lives of integrity to a period of freedom where they gained knowledge and a new level of awareness. That’s a good mirror for the experience of coming out.”

Shapiro joined JQ in 2004, after he heard about the organization through a friend and went to a Chanukah party where he met young people who were gay, Jewish and eager to integrate and deepen those identities through activism.

“I especially liked the fact that it was nondenominational,” Shapiro said. “Everyone was there because of the common experience of being gay Jews, regardless of their background.”

Shapiro said that while developing the haggadah has been a collaborative effort from the start, he traces his own enthusiasm for the project to his experience leading JQ’s seder two years ago.

“I took a couple of weeks to prepare,” he said. “I learned there were lots of different types of haggadot — for example, since the ’70s, there’ve been feminist versions and environmentally aware versions, in addition to basic historical narratives. But even though some of them included gay and lesbian elements, there was nothing that really worked for our people.”

Shapiro and the other members of the JQ community involved in the project have assembled the gay and lesbian components of other haggadot and added additional elements from LGBT history that resonate with the Passover story to produce an entirely new document that reflects the distinctive experiences and knowledge of their group. “Each haggadah captures the unique experience of the Jewish community that created it,” Shapiro said. “We’re taking a tradition we’ve created and putting it in the body of literature that sustains the Passover tradition. This has really been a codification process of a new chapter in Jewish history.”

Shapiro also points out that JQ’s haggadah is as much about recovering history as making it.